


Not That Easy

by mmorgan317



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: 3.14, Episode Tag, Hurt Winn Schott Jr., Hurt/Comfort, Schott Through The Heart, Winn Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:55:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24054751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mmorgan317/pseuds/mmorgan317
Summary: Rewrite of 3.14 to include some more whump for Winn.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Rating: PG-13
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing of Supergirl and never will. I’m merely borrowing Winn and the others for some whumpy fun.
> 
> Author’s Note(s): The idea for this came to me when I was watching 3.14 for the second time. At the time, I wasn’t all that familiar with Jeremy’s gait and so, to me, it seemed like Winn was walking oddly. I have since come to recognize it as that being just how Jeremy/Winn walks, but it had me wondering how the episode would look if Winn had gotten hurt at the cemetery. So, here’s my take on it. I will also be adding a bit of whump for him from the flying monkeys.   
>  I was also a bit annoyed at how easily Winn forgave his mother. I mean, I know that he is the sweetest, most forgiving person on the show (in my humble opinion), but I do not understand how he went from not caring if she stayed to the bar scene at the end. Like, while I’m glad he didn’t ask her to stay or anything, he definitely seemed like he didn’t want her to go. So, my version of their relationship will differ from canon. 
> 
> 2) This fic will definitely include dialogue from the episode, so please know that, no, I’m not that talented and the credit entirely goes to the writers.
> 
> 3) Also, I’m going to pretend there was a day in between when they rescued Mary from the toy factory and when they all went to karaoke. Chronologically, it just makes sense, and it also works for my own devious (okay, not really devious, but you know what I mean) purposes.

Winn returned to the DEO in time to witness Alex finishing up his mother’s post-explosion exam - a scene he never in his life thought he’d see. Of all the things he had thought would happen on the day of his father’s funeral, his mother showing up hadn’t even occurred to him. He’d imagined an explosion, albeit not set off by his own father though he probably should have guessed that one, but his mother coming back into his life had been something he’d long ago lost hope of ever happening. He’d gotten used to her absence, and he would have been fine if she hadn’t shown up at all.

“You okay?”

He looked over at Kara, still in her Supergirl costume, and inwardly winced at her pitying expression. Winn didn’t want or need her sympathy. “Yeah,” he said, looking back to the med lab where Alex was handing his mom off to another medic. “I’m..” He trailed off, his gaze lowering to the floor, unsure how to finish that thought. The fact of the matter was, he didn’t know how he was feeling. His emotions were so erratic and incoherent that he felt like he was feeling everything and nothing all at once.

A quick glance back at the med lab showed Alex approaching them, saving him from having to try and explain what he meant. “Your turn,” the elder Danvers said in her normal no-nonsense way. Her expression was warm, but firm, showing she had no intention of letting him try to talk his way out of it. Not that he would have tried. Not really. He would have liked to have put it off for a lot longer, but he would have given in eventually. Alex stepped to the side, waiting for him to start walking.

Winn sighed. “I don’t suppose I can talk you into letting me do this later?”

“Nope,” Alex answered, her arms over her chest. “Especially because, of the seven of us, I think you’re the only one who actually might need some medical care.”

Ah. He was hoping she hadn’t noticed.

“Wait,” Kara said, her gaze switching between Winn and her sister, then settling on him. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Winn lied.

“So, then why did James tell me you were injured?” Alex asked, waving her phone to show she’d meant that James had sent her a text. “According to him, you were limping around the cemetery when you thought no one was looking.”

“I was not limping,” Winn argued. When both Danvers continued to stare him down, he gave in. “Okay, there _may_ have been a little bit of limping, but it’s nothing, I’m fine.”

“Med lab. Now,” Kara commanded, pointing towards the area with her left hand and looking none too pleased.

Winn held up his hands in surrender and headed over to the lab, wincing with every other step. “I really am fine,” he said as the Danvers sisters herded him to the first bed. Kara remained in the doorway, effectively blocking the exit since they both knew he wouldn’t be able to get past her unless she allowed him to, while Alex stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed over her chest as she waited for him to get settled. “Look, it’s nothing,” he said as the both of them continued to stare at him. “I moved my leg wrong when Kara shielded me from the blast, did something to my knee, but I’m fine, I promise.”

“Mmhmm,” Alex said, her tone showing she wasn’t actually listening. “Can I take a look?”

Winn sighed, throwing his hands up in frustration. At least she asked for permission first. “Knock yourself out.”

“I’m assuming you aren’t going to change so I can do this properly?” Alex asked, sounding like she already knew the answer to her question. When Winn shook his head (there was no way he was going to be getting undressed with Kara around, not to mention his mother also being in the building), Alex nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Okay, well, in that case, this might hurt a little bit.”

Winn’s brows furrowed in confusion, worry sneaking in. “Um, okay…” He watched as she brought a chair over so she was in a better position to examine his leg. “Just, just so I’m clear, exactly _how_ painful is this going to be?”

“Well, as long as you aren’t lying about how much you’re hurting…” she said, trailing off as she sat down and then gently pressed on the sides of his knee. Not having expected it, Winn hissed at the sharp stab of pain her touch brought. Alex’s expression was annoyingly knowing as she leaned back. “…it shouldn’t hurt too bad.”

“I swear, it doesn’t hurt that much,” Winn said, not wanting them to get the wrong idea, like, say, for instance, that they were right. “It just caught me off guard, that’s all.”

“Right,” Alex said disbelievingly. “You ready now?”

“Sure?” How much more did she really need to do?

“You don’t sound so sure,” Kara pointed out from her spot at the door.

Regardless of whether he was ready or not, Alex began her exam in earnest. It felt like she was much gentler this time as she pressed on his knee; at least, it didn’t hurt as much, so he assumed she was being gentler about it. Winn winced from the pressure and pain, the expression staying on his face from then on. Alex moved from feeling around his knee, to testing its range of motion. Only once she was done with that did she back up and stand.

“Alright, well, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I think you were right,” she said with an expression bordering between surprise and annoyance. “Judging from your pain responses, and your range of motion, I think you twisted your knee. If you take it easy, it shouldn’t bother you too long.”

“Great, can I go back to work now?” Not that he had a lot to do at the moment, but staring blankly at a computer screen or five would certainly be better than seeing the pitying expressions on his friends’ faces.

For an answer, Alex waved her right hand towards the door in a ‘be my guest’ gesture. “Thanks,” Winn said, easing himself off the bed, then making his way to the stairs.

“I hate to ask,” Kara said, following him, “but I have to-”

“He’s dead, Kara,” Winn interrupted, already knowing where she was going.

“Are you sure?”

“He’s dead!” Winn reiterated, yelling it loudly enough for everyone to hear as he descended the stairs. “I had the warden and two separate medical examiners sign off on the body. I had them cross-check his dental records and his fingerprints, just to be sure. The dude in the box was my father. Okay?”

“So, why blow himself up at his own funeral?” Kara argued, hanging back a little while Winn threaded his way through the command center, heading straight for his desk.

“Maybe for the headline,” James suggested from his spot against Demos’ desk.

 _And wouldn’t that be just like the Toyman_ , Winn thought bitterly. He scoffed. “Yeah. ‘Toyman’s Last Trick’,” he muttered disdainfully, passing J’onn. “Sounds about right.”

A headache he didn’t have until this conversation started, throbbed behind his eyes, continuing through to his temples. Winn rubbed at his head, hoping to distract himself from his friends’ insistence that the incident at the cemetery was something more than his father being the lunatic he was.

“I still think we should run a full mass spectrometry on the explosive residue, Winn. It may tell us who’s helping your father,” J’onn said, evidently taking Kara’s side on the matter.

Okay, so technically, Papa Bear was simply being overly cautious, but Winn wasn’t in the mood right now to be generous. The past few days had been hell, his nerves were shot long before his estranged mother had come back, and he couldn’t deal with the idea of someone actually wanting to help his father commit more crimes. He just couldn’t.

Winn spun. “No one is helping him!” he yelled, having reached the end of his patience. “Seriously, he was a crazy person. Crazy people do crazy things. Like, oh, I don’t know, mass murder.”

The looks the three of them gave him after his outburst made Winn want to yell some more. Thankfully, Alex chose that time to rejoin them. “Well, I’m happy to report that Mary has a clean bill of health.” Okay, not the topic Winn would have chosen for her to start on, but he’d take what he could get if it meant giving him time to calm down. “She..wants to talk to you.”

Winn almost laughed, perhaps a little crazily, at that request. Of course his mother would want to talk to him, but did she ever stop to wonder if _he_ would want to talk to _her_?

“Yeah, she’s had 20 years to talk to me,” Winn said, turning his back on everyone and sitting down at his computer.

Although his workspace wasn’t private by any definition of the word, it felt like it to Winn. Sitting in his super-comfortable chair, staring at his screen, and focusing on his work never failed to make the rest of the world fall away. The worries said world carried never seemed to leave him, but here he was able to ignore them…for a little while at least.

Behind him, he heard the voices of M’yrnn, J’onn, Kara, and Alex, presumably as they conversed with one another, but he didn’t pay them any attention. One of his screens was running an algorithm to try and trace the Worldkillers, while the other one was apparently trying to find a connection between his father and someone who could, potentially, be helping do his father’s bidding after his death. If they weren’t going to listen to him, why did they bother arguing with him?

Ignoring the names that were slowly starting to pop up, Winn focused on the first monitor. If there was one thing that was guaranteed to get his mind off of his family’s drama, it was a bunch of people hoping to destroy the world.

**oOo**

It didn’t take Winn long to realize there was nothing he could do besides watch for any potential results his algorithm might come up with. Not that he had thought there would be, but he’d been hoping for a good distraction. Sighing, he pulled out the fidget spinner he kept between the keyboard and the monitor, and started fiddling with it. The act of balancing the device while spinning it gave him something to do while he kept his eyes glued to the screen.

“So, you work with Supergirl.” His mother’s voice was not something that Winn wanted to hear, and not because he wasn’t in the right headspace to try and forgive her. The work they were doing was classified - she wasn’t allowed there. She chuckled, sounding pleased. “You should sit up straight, be proud.”

Winn did sit up a little straighter, but not because she told him to. “You cannot be down here,” he said, slightly leaning forward.

His mother barely paid him any attention. “Oh please,” she said, her gaze focused on the TV screens on the wall. “If anyone asks, I’m just looking for the bathroom.”

“It’s around the corner, to the left. Okay, bye now,” Winn said hurriedly, trying to get her back out of sight so she could be out of mind again. But alas, she wouldn’t take the hint.

“Yeah, I tried that one, but it was closed for ‘enhanced interrogation’.” Upon receiving a couple of awkward glances from Winn’s coworkers, she added, “Kidding. Jeez. Just kidding.”

“You think this is funny?” he asked, unable to keep his anger and frustration out of his voice.

“Oh, a little gallows humor never killed anybody.” She touched one of the screens, making Winn very glad they weren’t touch-screen, then pivoted to face him. “Well, except for the fellas hanging from the gallows.”

Winn half stood, using the desk to help support him when his knee sent pain through his leg. “What do you _want_?” he asked, his fingers curling into as much of a fist as he could make with his palm almost flat on his desk’s surface. His mom’s cheerful facade fell, then she sighed. Winn hung his head. Right, she wanted to talk to him. “Fine,” he said, straightening. “Follow me.”

Limping more than he wanted to, Winn led her around the staircase, to one of the rooms that Kara used to train. Winn had never been told the actual name of the room, but it was private and had plenty of space, and that was all he needed from it at the moment.

Opening the door, he entered first then he held it open for his mother to follow him. She sighed as soon as she entered, the calm persona she’d been wearing disappearing the moment the door was closed behind her. “I just wanted to see your face, Winn,” she said, her voice sad and pleading. “I wanted to hear your voice, I-I-I wanted my son back.”

She paused to look at him, no doubt to gauge how he felt about that, but Winn wouldn’t give her anything to go on. He kept his expression as neutral as he could with the rage and pain he was feeling roiling inside of him.

“I have spent 20 years imagining this moment and now I…” she trailed off as he fully faced her and she caught sight of his expression. Her inhale could almost have been a gasp if it hadn’t been for how quiet it was. The excitement he’d seen beginning to creep into her face at the idea of their reconnecting faded and she tried again with a more solemn composure. “Leaving you, it gutted me.” Winn sighed, not wanting to hear how hard it had been for _her_. “And I’ve carried that with me every day of my life, but I had to, Winn, because your father-”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry, let me guess,” Winn interrupted, knowing that if he heard the cliche words come out of her mouth, he’d lose what little there was in his stomach, and quite possibly his mind. “He threatened your life.”

“No, Winn. He threatened yours.”

Winn’s mouth slightly dropped out of shock. Murderer and psychopath, his father might have been, but Winn had grown up believing that, underneath all of that, his father had loved him, that his father wouldn’t purposely hurt him. He’d believed that as easily as he’d known the sun was hot, and winter was cold. And, God help him, finding out that wasn’t the case actually hurt.

“He told me, that if I went near you, ever, that he would kill you. And when he died, I thought it was safe, but I was wrong. You’re still in danger.”

A part of him wanted to immediately step back when she moved towards him, but, whether it was the shock of what she was telling him, the exhaustion of the last several days, or the gentle throbbing in his knee, he found he couldn’t move. “I don’t believe you,” he said, refusing to believe her.

She shook her head sadly. “You saw what your father did at his own funeral,” she said, trying to convince him, but Winn wasn’t having any of it.

“I saw the last grasping prank of a lunatic,” Winn argued, cutting off anything else she might have said. “And now, what I’m, what I’m hearing is an excuse,” he said, slightly waving his hand towards her. “Twenty years in the making.” He scoffed. “Hey, I had 20 years to think, too. You wanna know what I think about the most?”

Her expression said that she didn’t, but she allowed him to continue anyways.

“Let me set the scene for you,” he continued as memories flooded in. “It’s the night Dad finally snapped. And I’m sitting in the police station, freezing cold, because I’m in my pajamas. When the police came and picked me up from home, I was asleep, remember?” he asked, his eyebrows pinching together as anger took control of his face, “in bed. Alone. And the nice officer, he drapes the coat over my shoulders. I feel a little better.”

Winn rolled his right shoulder as the non-existent weight settled back around him, trying to shrug the invisible coat off. He didn’t want or need it now.

“So I’m sitting there, and my cold little feet are dangling in the air, and I’m waiting. I’m waiting for _my mom_ to pick me up.” Tears sprung into his eyes, briefly choking him. Doing his best to ignore the tears he could see forming in his mother’s eyes, he continued, “‘Cause they said that they-they-they called you. Yeah..yeah, they said it was just gonna be like an hour, and then they’d explain everything. And then it was two hours. And then it was the next morning.”

Winn chewed on his lip, snarling with anger and pain he could no longer hide. He drew in a shaky breath, refusing to allow any tears to fall.

“When I lie in bed at night, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep, I-I’m not wondering why Dad finally, suddenly, snapped. No, that doesn’t haunt me. What haunts me is _you_. You, who _left me_ , when I need you the most, with no explanation, no goodbye.”

Winn couldn’t stop the tears that choked him, cutting his voice off on random words. He didn’t let them fall, but in every other way, they were evident and he knew it. He wished he could have cried, just let that pain out, but years in foster care had taught him never to show weakness to anyone other than a friend and his mother definitely didn’t fall into that category.

Her chin wobbled as she held back her own tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said, but Winn couldn’t listen to her apologies.

“I don’t care anymore,” he said, heading for the door. Either she needed to leave, or he did, but he couldn’t be in this room with her anymore.

“Winn,” she called, plaintively.

“No, I don’t need your excuses,” he said, holding up a hand to keep her from talking. “You wanna keep me safe? Great.” He reached the door and opened it. “You know what you should do? Leave again!”

Standing there, waiting for her to do just that, to abandon him once more, killed him. He didn’t know how he’d feel if she stayed, but he knew he’d be just as heartbroken as he was the first time if she left. And yet, a small part of him actually wanted her gone. Things would go back to normal and he could go back to being Winn Schott Jr, resident genius of the DEO.

Commotion from outside of the room drew his attention from his mother. It took him all of two seconds to realize something was going on, and that he needed to see what it was. “Something’s happening,” he said before leaving the room and heading for the balcony that Kara landed on whenever she flew to the building.

“What the hell is that?” he heard James ask Kara. Winn stared at the sky, trying to understand what he was seeing.

“It’s a message,” his mom answered, joining him. “For me.”

Who could be writing her a message with sky art?

“Is that a wicked witch?” James asked, still staring out the windows.

“No,” Kara said, her eyesight infinitely better than almost everyone’s at the DEO. “Is it flying monkeys?”

Winn almost made a Wizard of Oz reference, but then the windows broke as dozens of mechanical monkeys stormed the DEO. Instinct took over, and Winn placed a hand on his mom’s back, forcing her to crouch down with him so the monkeys could fly over them without hitting them. His knee screeched at the movement, but he ignored it in favor of standing and running for cover.

“Quickly! Uh, under the desks,” he instructed as James punched one of the monkeys with his bare fists. “Come on!”

“What are you doing?” his mom called after him, following him, though at a slower rate. “We’ve gotta stay down!”

Sparks from damaged wiring lit up behind them, and Winn could feel the heat from it as he pivoted to face her a little better while he ran. “This is my job, Mom!”

He had almost reached the desks when he saw his mom fall. Thankfully James was with her, but Winn still stopped, preparing to go back for her when two monkeys flew at his head. He ducked, covering his face with his hands, ignoring the searing pain that burned through his right forearm as he jumped over the command table and landed rather ungracefully onto the floor where three mechanical monkeys cornered him.

“Oh! You came for me,” he said, surprised by the idea.

The monkeys disappeared in a shower of sparks as another one crashed into them. Taking that as his cue, Winn got up to run, faltering when his right knee buckled a little under the sudden weight. It turned out to be a good thing as it saved him from being God-only-knows-what by yet another flying monkey. Well, that and his mother grabbing the thing.

“Get away from him, you nightmare,” she snarled at it, her face a mask of anger.

When the monkey turned on her, she dropped her hold, then cried out in fright as Kara’s heat vision destroyed the thing completely. Winn brought his arm up out of reflex to protect himself from the light, then turned to watch as Kara and James destroyed the remaining monkeys.

“This is your _job_?” his mom asked as they made their way towards his friends. “ _This_ is?”

Winn jumped as more sparks shot out of a broken computer, then sighed. “It’s not normally so…exciting,” he said, waving towards all the broken bits of mechanical monkey lying around. Actually, it was this exciting fairly often, but since he knew that wouldn’t make her feel any better, he didn’t say that.

“Are you guys okay?” Kara asked, still standing by the monkey she’d stabbed with a pole as she surveyed the damage done to the room.

“A bit bruised, but otherwise I’m good,” James answered, sounding happy. He sure did like the adrenaline boost he got while he was fighting, didn’t he?

A tickling sensation drew Winn’s notice to his arm, where he saw blood trailing down to his wrist. “I appear to be bleeding,” he said with surprise. It took a minute for him to remember why he was bleeding, then the pain set in and he hissed.

His mom was the first to reach him, grabbing his arm none too gently and holding it up so she could see it better. “What happened?” she asked with something almost like alarm in her voice.

“One of the monkeys got too close,” Winn answered, wincing as she moved his arm again. He pulled his wrist out of her grasp, pinning it to his chest with his left hand instead. “These,” he swatted at one of the bodies with his foot, “things have really sharp wings, lemme tell you.”

“Alright, I’ll call Alex, have her come in so she can take a look at it,” Kara said, her brows furrowed in concern. “It looks like you might need stitches.”

“And ruin her night off with J’onn and M’yrnn? No way,” Winn argued. “I’m sure there’s someone here who can do the stitches perfectly well, if they’re really needed. No, just let her know what’s happened, but that we’ve got it all under control.”

“Do we? Have everything under control?” James asked with raised eyebrows.

“Absolutely,” Winn assured, though he didn’t know if he was lying or not. “Look, people are already regrouping, getting things back together. Amanda can patch me up while we start gathering the monkey remains, and then I can start trying to figure out where these suckers came from.”

“Who’s Amanda?” James asked, never having heard the name before.

“She’s the one who fills in for Alex when she’s away,” Kara answered. She looked uneasy about the idea of leaving her sister out of the loop to a certain degree, but in the end she nodded, looking at Winn. “Okay, I’ll find Amanda and have her meet you in the med lab. While I call Alex and update her, I’ll also get the cleanup started.” She looked around at the mess the command center had become. “The sooner you figure out who’s doing this, the better.”

**oOo**

The cleanup was almost finished by the time Amanda was done with him. She’d taken her sweet time examining him, making sure she’d ticked off every box she could think of before she finally agreed with Supergirl on the stitches, giving him a local anesthetic before she’d left to grab the kit. The actual time spent sewing him up didn’t seem to take half so long as getting her to agree that it needed to be done. Her hands were steady and sure as she went, her focus solely on his arm. Once she was satisfied, she wrapped his arm up, supposedly to secure the bandage in place, but Winn still thought it was overkill.

Winn sighed as he came down the stairs. Vast improvements had been made while he’d been upstairs, but there were still things that needed fixing. But, for now, that wasn’t his job. No, his job was to figure out the flying monkeys, so that was what he was going to do.

“Hey, man, you good?” James asked, meeting him at the foot of the stairs.

“Yeah.” James looked at the wrapping on his arm and raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “Oh, this? No, this is just Amanda being cautious. I think she’s afraid of Alex firing her if something happens to me, or something ridiculous like that.”

Winn inwardly winced at how arrogant that sounded, but, as much as he would want to, he couldn’t say it wasn’t true. When they had first met, things between him and Alex had been…glacial. In her defense, she was running a secret government facility and he was, essentially, trespassing on it half the time. However, it wasn’t until she’d discovered he could be useful, both for the DEO as well as Kara, that she started to let her guard down, and it hadn’t been until he’d started working at the DEO that she had begun to truly thaw towards him. He wasn’t exactly sure when their dynamic had changed from coworkers to siblings, but there was no denying that’s precisely what they were.

“Well, your mom’s right,” James said, following Winn as he headed for the rolling cart of mechanical monkey pieces. “Somebody is definitely helping your dad out.”

Yeah, Winn thought so too, but he wasn’t going to say that aloud. “I just, honestly just wish she would leave,” he said, ignoring James’ comment in favor of changing the subject. He placed the wire basket of monkey parts onto the well-lit table, wincing when the action overstretched his newly-stitched skin. “Like, who the hell does she think she is, anyway, huh? Like, she just doesn’t get to walk back into my life after 20 years. I did not get a say in her walking out. I definitely get a say in her walking back in.”

“It’s a fair point,” James answered in a tone that made Winn stop and look over at his friend.

“You-you think that I should?” he asked, reading the answer in James’ face and answering chuckle. “No!” Win said, lightly slapping the tabletop in annoyance. “Dude, no. Don’t think that I should.” Knowing that a distraction was his friend right now, Winn grabbed a huge chunk of mechanical monkey and placed it on the table, beginning to sort through all they’d collected.

“Brother, it doesn’t matter what I think,” James assured, though they both knew that was a lie, “it matters what you need.”

Well, that would be excellent advice if Winn knew what he needed. Did he need his mother back in his life, even though she’d abandoned him? Or did he need her to simply disappear again and never come back? Knowing he would never be able to answer that without a lot of thought going into it, he scoffed.

“You know what? Even if, even if, my dad had threatened to kill me, she could have done a thousand other things. Gone to the police, the FBI. No. Instead, she _decided_ to abandon me. And you know what? She has to deal with the consequences. I don’t-” Winn cut himself off before he outright admitted that it wasn’t always up to him to be the one to forgive and forget. This was one of those times where he just didn’t have it in him to be the peacekeeper. “You know, if-if she’d have stayed,” he scoffed at the mere idea of it, “then, maybe, you know, we could have had a…You know, a great relationship, I don’t-” Winn shrugged and turned around, unable to finish that idea.

“Dude, let me stop you right there. That is a _dangerous_ thought exercise, designed purely just to piss you off.”

Winn shook his head, unable to articulate how pissed off he already was. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw James join him at the table, but he ignored that in favor of continuing to sort.

“When my dad died,” James said, and Winn sighed because he wasn’t really in the mood for a life lesson from a friend, but he certainly wasn’t going to be rude either. “My mom did everything for me and my sister. She worked night and day, busted her ass, and I _still_ blamed her. Because she was the only one there. And that was rough. We got over it, though. You know, it took a long time, and a lot of forgiveness, and me taking responsibility for my part in that.” James took a moment, offering Winn support in the best way he knew how. “You can’t change what happened, but she’s here now. It’s up to you want you wanna do with that.”

Giving Winn a couple reassuring pats on his back, James walked away, leaving Winn to attempt to sort through his feelings and the monkeys in peace.

**TBC**


	2. Chapter 2

By the time his mother caught up with him in his lab, Winn still hadn’t figured out what he wanted or how he felt. At first, he hadn’t been able to think of anything but those two things, but when his mind kept running around in circles without a solution in sight, he’d switched to figuring the monkeys out. Between James bashing them to pieces and Kara’s heat vision tearing through them, there wasn’t a whole lot of them left, which meant sifting through lots of broken, little pieces to try and figure out, not only how they worked, but also who had made them. His saving grace had come in the form of Roddy bringing him an almost whole monkey, a smile on his face.

“Ah!” Winn gasped as electricity went through his hand. He groaned in frustration at the monkey, vowing a lot of vengeance on it once he’d had his way with it.

“That is an angry monkey corpse,” his mom said from behind him.

Winn briefly turned around to look at her, then refocused on the monkey. “I was hoping to access this thing’s inner workings, but it’s like a game of ‘Operation’. Every time I get close to cracking it, it just..zaps me.” And it was going to pay for that soon.

“Can I try?” she asked, now practically right at his shoulder. She pushed in front of him, heading for his box of tools. “I _love_ ‘Operation’.”

Winn stepped back to get out of her way, grimacing when pain shot through his knee. While it hadn’t been that bad of an injury when he’d gotten here, the events that had unfolded since, as well as his inability to stay off the leg, had made it so the throbbing never seemed to stop; it quieted enough for him to ignore it, but it never entirely ceased.

“I’m not sure if you noticed, but it’s, like, a top-secret government facility in here,” he said, really not wanting her to stick around or help him. He was glad that neither Kara nor Alex were around because he was pretty sure they would have made a comment about that not stopping _him_ from meddling when it suited him before he was officially hired.

“Oh, nobody cares,” she argued back, still digging through the tool box. One of the lab techs walked by, needing something from their workstation, and his mom looked up at them. “Are you paid enough to care? No, of course not! You should unionize, by the way.”

“Mom, kay, that’s…”

“Did I ever tell you I was once your father’s apprentice?” she interrupted, already moving on.

Winn held up his hands in surrender as she headed back towards the monkey, a screwdriver in hand, and stepped out of the way. “I thought you two met in Ivy Town.”

“Uh, we were both students, yes, but that’s not where we met.” She spent a few seconds looking at the monkey, then she headed for the breastplate near the top. Winn reached out to stop her, or to warn her to be careful, but the monkey didn’t react to her unscrewing the plate, annoyingly enough. “I kept the books at the local toy store and your father was the genius stock boy. And he taught me about the math in the machine. One and one is two, it’s simple, it’s elegant. It’s..clean.” She popped the breastplate off. “Just like a wind-up toy.” She handed the plate to him, heading for something from the other side of the room for…Winn didn’t know what from a different tool box. “Your father’s mind was a wind-up toy. I know what made it tick.”

“So then you knew how to stop him from, uh, going crazy and killing a bunch of people,” Winn said, silently kicking himself for how childish he sounded. No matter how he felt about her continued presence in his life right now, the past was the past. There was nothing either of them could do to change it, and no amount of rehashing things was going to make either one of them feel better about the lost time. So, then why did he feel the need to bring it up?

“Um, do you remember when I took you to Disneyland when you were nine?” she asked, sounding almost hesitant to bring it up.

“Do I remember?” he asked, the question seeming ridiculous to him. “Yeah, we drove over _night_ , ‘cause you wanted to be there the _second_ it opened. And then we get into a car accident at 2:00 a.m. in the morning and Dad has to come and pick us up and take us home. We never actually went to Disneyland.”

“No,” she says with a slight shake of her head. “We were never going _there_. We were going to a domestic abuse shelter.” Winn pivoted to better face her, shock making his mouth drop slightly open. “And he ran us off the road. Stole a car, sped down the highway, ran us into a ditch. You sat dazed in the backseat with a _concussion_ , and he and I had it out on the shoulder of the interstate. That’s the night that he threatened to kill you, his only son, _just_ to hurt _me_.”

While Winn tried to process that, she re-joined him. at the work table. Winn stepped aside, his mind reeling and his heart pounding.

“Your father didn’t just go to bed normal and wake up the next morning a monster,” she said, and Winn looked at her, watching as several emotions danced across her face. “He was paranoid, he was controlling, he..he was mean.”

“I never saw it,” Winn admitted, his heart breaking for what his mother had gone through while his brain tried to comprehend the new information it was being given.

“I didn’t want you to,” she answered, sounding almost proud that she’d succeeded. “And I’m sorry, Winn. I’m sorry that..that..I couldn’t get us out from under his shadow. That I couldn’t save you.”

“That’s not on you,” he assured, feeling a little guilty for all that anger and blamed he’d laid on her.

“Maybe not,” she said, though she didn’t sound like she truly believed it, “but the last 20 years, those were, and you were right about that, but I just wanted you to understand why.”

Did he understand? Intellectually, yes, he understood everything. But emotionally? He wasn’t sure. There was still a part of him that was the little boy she’d left so long ago. That part remembered his father as a loving, quiet, good person, and was refusing to accept the awful truth of everything he’d just been told. As a kid, he’d never seen anything of what his mother described. Even after she’d left, his father had been nothing but kind to him.

Winn stepped back, allowing his mom full access to the monkey while he sat down on the stool behind him. Given everything, he wasn’t sure how long his legs were going to continue holding him up. The figurative rug had been pulled out from under him so many times today that all Winn could do was hope that it didn’t hurt too much when he finally landed back on solid ground.

**oOo**

“Any luck on figuring out who’s behind the Toyman attacks?” James asked somewhat impatiently as he walked into the lab. He honestly didn’t know how everyone here could stand all the downtime they got, waiting for test results, or for computers to finish running scans. It would have driven him crazy had he actually worked here.

“No, but we’ve discovered a thousand ways how not to make a flying monkey,” Winn’s mother answered.

“And, also, a few ways to make better flying monkeys,” Winn pointed out.

“Oh, the wiring on these is amateurish, at best.”

James thought about pointing out that the craftsmanship of the things wasn’t really what they should be focusing on right now, but Winn spoke first. “Alas, we are no closer to finding out who actually built them.”

Winn headed for his incredibly well-stocked tool box, turning it to better face him once he reached it. Though he hid it well, James could see that he was hurting, emotionally and physically, and he didn’t like it. But, at least Winn and his mother seemed to have come to some sort of agreement because the air between them was definitely a lot less frosty now, so James supposed that was a win of sorts.

“I could use a break,” Winn’s mom said, breaking the silence. “I’m gonna head downstairs, rest for a little bit.”

James smiled in acknowledgement, even though she wasn’t really talking to him. He watched Winn’s eyes track her progress out of the lab with something almost akin to worry on his face. “So, I take it you and she talked,” he said once she’d left.

It took a minute for the genius to realize someone was talking to him, and when he did he took a deep breath, as though snapping out of some sort of daydream. “I’m sorry, what’d you say?” he asked, idly playing with a screwdriver. His brows wrinkled, then he said, “Talked? Oh, yes, we, uh, we definitely, definitely talked, and, that’s all I plan on saying about it.”

James cocked his head to the side in confusion as Winn headed back for the monkey. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?” He turned and leaned against the table, watching his friend closely.

“Because, I just, I-I can’t, okay? I’m sorry, but I just..can’t right now.” The stress in Winn’s voice reminded James of when he’d briefly quit being ‘the man in the van’ after he’d gotten beaten up and had had his life threatened.

To this day, James was ashamed at how he’d handled that whole situation. He’d approached it how _he’d_ viewed it, not how Winn had. He’d thought that all his friend had needed was to ease back into things, and he would have been fine, but he hadn’t been able to see just how much distress Winn had been in at the time, and the shorter man had, understandably, snapped.

Well James saw it now, and he was worried.

“What’s going on, brother?” he asked, making sure to keep his voice soft. “And don’t tell me ‘nothing’, because we both know that’s not true.”

Winn sighed. “Look, I-I appreciate that you’re checking on me, but we have a crazy person building killer mechanical monkeys to find, and if I were to even try to start explaining the things going through my head, then..then I might not stop and Kara and my mom really need this person found, which means I can’t afford to be distracted, and I..I…” he trailed off, apparently unable to finish his thought.

“Okay,” James said, knowing that was all he was going to get for the moment. “But when this is all over, we’re gonna talk.”

“You don’t need to make it sound quite so much like a threat,” Winn teased, offering the first real smile James had seen from him since his father had died.

“See, now that’s funny, because I wasn’t making it sound like a threat. That’s how you took it.” James pushed against the table and approached his friend. Giving Winn’s shoulder a squeeze, he said, “I’m gonna go see if Kara or Mon-El have found out anything. Let us know when you’ve got something.”

“I always do,” Winn absently answered, his focus already back on the monkey in front of him.

James silently left the lab. Once in the hall he paused and looked over his shoulder, worry still gnawing at his gut. Winn was almost amazingly good at compartmentalizing his feelings, but James knew that a time would come when the container was too full and Winn would explode from everything he was feeling. Hopefully, they could have their talk before that happened, but somehow, James didn’t think they’d be that lucky.

**oOo**

Winn sighed in relief as James left the lab. He knew his friend was simply trying to help, but the fact of the matter was that Winn simply couldn’t go where James wanted him to. Not yet. So, he’d turned his attention to the monkey, his eyes noticing something amiss and his brain frantically trying to figure out what it was. It took him far longer than it should have to finally get it, but once he did, it also registered with him that his mom had been gone an awful long time. Given that she liked to tinker almost as much as he did, he had expected her to be gone ten, maybe fifteen, minutes at most; it was now approaching twenty-five minutes.

Setting his tools down, Winn went in search of her. His knee was killing him by the time he’d finished going room to room throughout the facility, but his quick step hid the limp well as he entered the command center. 

“Have you guys seen my mom?” he asked, hoping that she’d merely evaded him during his search.

“I thought you two were putting Humpty Dumpty together again,” Mon-El answered, managing to throw in an Earth reference that Winn hadn’t realized he’d known. The future must have taught the Daxamite a lot while he’d been there.

“No, she’s gone,” Winn answered, joining them at the table. “So is the side panel from the monkey’s gear chamber.”

Just as his brain started coming up with all the scenarios in which that was a bad thing, a transmission alert popped up on the wall-mounted TVs. Winn’s heart skipped a beat as he saw his mom stuck in a ginormous mechanical claw.

“Oh no,” he whispered, stepping around Kara to get closer to the TVs. He barely heard the woman’s voice as she laid out the threat, and he ignored his mother’s command not to come at all, his heart speeding up as adrenaline and anger kicked in.

“I’ll go,” Kara said.

“Me too,” Mon-El offered.

“Not without me,” Winn added, doing his best to keep a snarl out of his voice.

“That’s exactly what she wants,” James pointed out, evidently not liking the idea of Winn joining them.

“I’ve spent my entire life trying to fight off the part of me that’s like my dad,” Winn said, ignoring his friend’s warning as he walked out of the command center and headed back to his lab. He appreciated James’ concern, but he wasn’t in a mood to sit back and wait. “But now, now I can use it. Let’s go.”

It felt really good to let the anger in, and to use it for a better purpose than his dad had ever tried to. He grabbed the monkey, some tools, better wiring, and a remote control, packed them all into a bag, then joined James and Mon-El in the SUV. He didn’t want to waste any more time than was necessary; he’d build his idea while they drove.

“Are you sure about this?” Kara asked, her voice quiet so that only she and Winn could hear. “And I’m not just talking about whether or not your idea will work,” she hastily added, though that hadn’t even occurred to him. “But, there’s no shame in waiting for us to get Mary.”

“If it was Alex, or J’onn, would you wait?” he countered, keeping his temper in check. He had thought she’d given up trying to protect him, but apparently he’d been wrong. Evidently his time spent at the DEO, and working with Guardian, hadn’t been enough to convince her that he could take care of himself just fine. Her expression gave him his answer. “That’s what I thought,” he said as he opened the door to the SUV. “We’ll meet you there.”

What was said or done once he’d gotten in, Winn didn’t know and nor did he care. He immediately got to work, rewiring the monkey the right way, and so that no one else to get into it and take control of it.

“Alright,” James said, hopping into the driver’s seat. “Let’s do this.”

**oOo**

Amazingly, Kara and Mon-El held back a little bit, allowing Winn and James to lead them all into the toy factory.

“Any ideas?” James asked as the beams from their flashlights highlighted shelves of toy parts and machinery.

“She was in that claw apparatus,” Mon-El said, though they all already knew that.

“Suspended from above,” Winn added, at a total loss of where to begin looking.

“We’ll find her,” Kara assured, her confidence comforting to Winn.

A buzzing drew their attention to behind them, and James lifted his flashlight to try and get a better look at what was coming at them, asking, “What is that?”

“It’s a plane.” Mon-El’s voice indicated that he couldn’t believe a plane was flying at them, but after the flying monkeys, Winn wasn’t going to discount anything that came at them.

“No, it’s not,” Winn said, his stomach sinking and his heart racing. “It’s a _bomb_.”

How he was so sure of that, Winn didn’t know. He felt like he’d seen something similar when he’d been tinkering with his dad one day in his workshop, but he couldn’t be sure. Either way, it didn’t matter as the plane slammed into the ground, detonating in a wave of heat and flame a few feet in front of Kara and Mon-El.

James and Winn ducked for cover while Kara and Mon-El raised their arms to protect their faces. The explosion flickered out within seconds, but there wasn’t time to recover as more bombs headed right for them.

“Go find Mary!” Kara commanded before she went to meet the planes head-on.

James and Winn scrambled upright and ran to find Winn’s mom. Urgency hadn’t ever been missing from the moment Winn had found out his mother was gone, but now it felt like it was there tenfold. If the woman who had his mother knew they were there, he couldn’t be sure how long she’d keep his mom alive. Technically, she hadn’t mentioned for him to come alone, but she also hadn’t said it was okay to bring backup either.

They turned the corner, running past small, purple, spotlights lining the floor. The minute Winn had reached the first one, a message started playing, reminding him of being in one of those creepy fun houses at a carnival.

“Welcome, welcome, to the Willard Walter Wiggins Game Company,” the voice said with far too much cheer, and just a hint of sadistic pleasure.

Evidently that was all the warning they were going to get before a remote controlled Hummer came after them, spouting fire at them from a miniature flame thrower that had been fixed to the top.

“Woah!” Winn yelled, freaking out as heat seared against his back. “We got a thing on our twelve!”

“That’s our six,” James corrected, because that was absolutely the most important thing to focus on right now.

“I am very stressed right now,” Winn argued back. Yes, he knew that was their six, but come on! When you have fire burning at your heels, who really cares if it’s the six or twelve?

Sparks exploding in front of them had them raising their arms up to protect their eyes. Oh good, so the thing didn’t just have a flame thrower, it also had a laser gun too. ‘Cause why wouldn’t it?

Another set of exploding sparks forced them to deviate from the straight flight path to avoid getting hit. Winn felt his knee buckle from the change, his step faltering as his leg seemed to do a jig completely independent from his brain’s commands, causing pain to sear through it.

“Literal Hot Wheels!” he commented, feeling a little bit impressed in spite of the fact that it was trying to kill them.

The Hummer jumped, like actually jumped, in mid-air to aim for them, and Winn ducked to give it a smaller target, almost falling over in the process. James, meanwhile, being the badass that he is, turned around and activated his Guardian shield, protecting them both from damage as well as knocking the Hummer aside, and thus taking it out of commission.

Winn paused, panting from exertion, adrenaline, and pain. His eyes roamed, searching for more threats, when they landed on the claw apparatus and…“Mom.”

More Hummers came zooming at them, looking like angry little ants ready for a fight.

“Go get her,” James said, and Winn hesitated for all of five seconds before doing as he was told.

“Mom!” Winn yelled as he entered the room, immediately heading for the controls to the claw.

“Turn around and leave right now!” his mom commanded, sounding distressed.

Winn ignored her, pulling the lever that would release her instead. He sighed as he heard the thing open. “I’m here to rescue you.”

“Don’t Luke Skywalker me,” she said, and Winn felt a surge of pride at the reference. “This crazy woman is trying to kill you. Don’t give her the chance!”

The sound of a gunshot, quickly followed by the screen with the timer exploding made both Winn and his mom jump. Winn spun around to find the woman who had, presumably, kidnapped his mom and set those sadistic toys on him and his friends, holding a gun on him.

“Well, if it isn’t Toyman Jr., barreling headlong into danger,” she said, keeping the gun aimed at Winn as she came closer so that she wouldn’t have a problem shooting him in the heart. “I see your father left you non of his _brains_.”

“Oh really?” Winn countered, refusing to take the bait. “‘Cause I-I see that he left you none of his, his showmanship.” She slightly moved her head and lowered the gun, silently asking what he meant. “What, after all this you’re just gonna shoot us?”

“Most important thing you father taught me, stick the landing,” she answered, taking aim.

“Really? Because, uh, what I got was, ‘More is more’.”

Winn activated the remote control, calling the monkey to the room. It flew through the window and headed straight for the woman, knocking the gun out of her hand as it headed to go fly around the rest of the factory. The gun landed just behind Winn, and he paused a whole second before he headed for it. He had just been about to grab for it when he felt something wrap around his throat, choking off his air supply.

“Winn!” his mother cried out with something akin to horror on her face.

Winn wasn’t given a chance to try and say or do anything as the string tightened around his throat and he hurtled backwards, landing on the factory’s hard floor with enough force to knock the air from his lungs.

The woman stepped around him so that he could see her, her fingers going white from how hard she was pulling on the yo-yo’s string. “Your dad taught me this one, too,” she sneered, taking pleasure in what she was doing.

Winn grabbed the yo-yo itself, struggling to get air. “Did he teach you this?” he asked, activating the blades within the yo-yo, crying out when one sliced through his hand. He cut the rope so he could breathe, then wriggled so he could stab it into her leg.

No sooner had he done that than the woman went flying backwards, a metal thunk the only indication that his mom had used her former prison to hit her captor.

Now free from being choked, Winn groaned as he got up, managing to only make it to a kneeling position before a brief bout of dizziness made him pause. “Childish things,” he said before tossing the yo-yo disdainfully away. Red on his hand drew his attention to the wound, and he stared at it to try and figure out how badly it was cut.

“Thank you, Winn,” his mom said. “We’ve got to get that cleaned out right now before it gets infected.” He groaned when she grabbed his arm while he stood. Even though it had only been a few hours since the monkeys had attacked, Winn doubted she remembered that he had stitches in that arm, right where she was gripping. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“Mom, recently,” he answered, refusing to remind her that he would have had one earlier if he hadn’t already gotten one. “I am _very_ cautious.” You had to be when you worked for the DEO; you never knew what scrape you would land yourself in, or what would get into your system when you got into trouble.

Backup chose that moment to arrive, with Kara leading and the two men following behind her. Winn heard her whisper an, “Oh,” before she looked down at the unconscious kidnapper, then looked back up at him.

“Oh, hey,” Winn greeted with a brief wave with his injured hand. He mouthed a silent cry of pain as fire seared through his fingers and arm, but tried to turn it into a smile.

“Are you guys okay?” Kara asked, her eyes flicking between Winn, his mom, and his bleeding hand.

“Winn needs get have his hand cleaned out and bandaged, but otherwise we’re unhurt,” his mom answered for the both of them.

Kara looked to him for confirmation and he just shrugged. Technically, he needed a lot more than that, but he wasn’t going to point that out. All in all, his mom was right, and that was good enough for him. Chances were good Kara knew just as well as he did that more needed to happen, anyways, so why bother stating the obvious?

“Right, well, why don’t I call in a team to lock this place down, then I’ll take _her_ ,” she pointed to the unconscious woman on the floor, “to the NCPD, while you guys head back to the DEO?” Kara suggested, giving them a game plan. Her gaze fell back on Winn, then she added, “I’ll check on you when I get back, okay?”

Winn nodded, too tired to do much more than that. As the adrenaline faded, he began to feel _everything_. His knee and his hand were throbbing in time with his heart rate, albeit to differing degrees, and his throat was raw and painful, leaving him with the idea of having inhaled fiberglass rather than oxygen. His arm ached where his mom had applied pressure to the stitches, making him hope they hadn’t popped because he did _not_ want the earful he would get from Amanda when she had to redo them.

His mom looked at him, her expression showing that she wanted to stay by his side as they exited. But when Mon-El stepped forward and offered to be her escort out, she gave a sad smile and allowed him to lead her back to the SUV. Winn sighed once they were out of earshot.

“You okay, brother?” James asked, coming towards him.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” Winn returned, limping heavily as he and James also started to leave. “You’re the one who battled pyromanic Hummers.”

“Something tells me you’ve had a harder day than I have.” James’ voice was warm as he spoke, but quiet, so that neither Winn’s mom, nor Mon-El, who, as far as Winn knew, didn’t have super hearing, wouldn’t hear their conversation.

“It’s been a hard _week_ ,” Winn corrected with a snort. “Never mind a day.”

James laughed, the sound easing a fraction of the pain in the Winn’s heart. “Fair enough,” he granted, keeping his pace slow enough to match Winn’s. “We don’t have to ride back with them. You know, if you don’t want to.”

“Thanks, but I’m good.”

Winn honestly wasn’t good at all, but the idea of refusing to take their one and only ride back to the DEO simply so he wouldn’t have to spend extra time with his mother seemed childish. In spite of all that had happened between them, he was an adult. He could handle a car ride spent in uncomfortable silence back to work. Hell, if he was lucky, maybe he’d even just pass out on the way so he wouldn’t have to deal with it at all. The way his luck seemed to be going lately, he doubted it would happen, but hey, a guy could dream, right?

Since James was the one with the keys, both his mom and Mon-El leaned against the outside of the SUV, arms crossed, but looking like they were having a casual conversation about the stars. Winn’s mom’s eyebrows furrowed in concern when she looked at him, and Winn saw her bite her lip to keep from asking if he was okay.

“Next time I leave before you,” Mon-El said when he saw them, “give me the keys so I don’t have to wait for you guys to catch up.”

“Aren’t you, like, impervious to cold or something?” James teased, unlocking the SUV so they could all get in.

“You’re thinking of Kryptonians,” Mon-El corrected, though three of the four of them knew Krypton wasn’t a cold planet by nature, and that both Kara and Mon-El had been to the Fortress of Solitude without ever feeling the cold. “Daxamites prefer warmer weather.”

“I’m sorry,” his mom chimed in, “but, what are Kryptonians and Daxamites?”

“Daxam is where Mon-El is from,” Winn answered, hesitating briefly before continuing. “Krypton was Daxam’s sister planet before the star they circled exploded, destroying both planets in the process.” Mon-El averted his gaze, the destruction of his home world no doubt still a sore subject for him. Winn winced. “Sorry.”

“It’s a fair explanation,” Mon-El said, waving aside his apology.

“And you know about these other planets because?” his mom asked, looking at him.

“Because it’s part of my job to know about the other worlds that visitors could be coming from,” Winn filled in with a sigh.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Mon-El said sarcastically.

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with you being a genius,” James interjected. “Didn’t you learn Kryptonian because you got bored?”

When his mom raised her eyebrows at him, looking impressed, Winn winced. “A lot of people have probably done that,” he demurred, not comfortable with how much pride he heard in his friends’ voices.

“No, I’m pretty sure no one could have learned an alien language, and become almost fluent in it, just because they were bored,” Mon-El argued. “Wait, didn’t he also learn Martian, too?”

Oh boy. “At any rate,” Winn interjected before they could embarrass him more, “needless to say, it’s my job to have all the information when it’s needed, so I have to stay current on things like foreign worlds.”

“Supergirl said you kept them running at the DEO,” his mom said. “Is that true?”

Man, even Kara was ganging up on him? “She was just being nice, you know, ‘cause you’re my mom.”

“Dude, you and I both know that’s not what she was doing,” James argued. “I may not work there, but I can say with 100% confidence that what Supergirl was saying was entirely true.”

Winn blushed and looked out the window. “Oh, thank god, we’re here,” he said as they pulled into the underground parking for the DEO.

They each showed their ID’s, then waited for them to be checked and confirmed before they were allowed to enter and park. The sound of the SUV doors closing was deafening in the silence that surrounded them. Both Winn and his mom jumped at the sound, with Winn looking around to make sure it hadn’t disrupted anyone else in the vicinity.

Not ten steps inside, they met up with Alex, who stood with her arms crossed over her chest and an almost angry expression on her face.

“Alex, hey,” Winn greeted, trying to hide his worry at seeing her mad. “What are you doing here? I thought you had the rest of the night off?”

“Well, I thought I’d come in after I got a call from both Supergirl and Amanda,” she said, but it was enough to tell him that _he_ was the reason she was standing there, looking ready to lead him by the ear to the med lab. “Yeah,” she added when she saw his expression, “exactly.”

“I’m not following,” his mom said, sounding confused.

“Your son wasn’t cleared, medically, to go on this rescue mission,” Alex answered, keeping her gaze focused on Winn. “And he knows it.”

“Okay, first, I wasn’t told I _couldn’t_ go on it,” Winn argued. “And second, I’m fine, alright? There’s no need for this much fuss.” Alex’s gaze went to his right hand where dried blood was visible around his knuckles. “Oh, come on, that doesn’t count. Th-that happened while I was there.” Alex stayed silent, doing that thing she did where she intimidated him with her eyes alone until he gave in. “Okay, fine, I’m going!” he said, holding his hands up in surrender, wincing when his right throbbed in protest.

Alex’s smile was remarkably similar to the cat that ate the canary. “Thank you,” she said, before focusing on the rest of them. “Supergirl isn’t back yet, but from what she said, you all need to be checked out as well.”

“Uh,” Mon-El began, only to be cut off by Alex, “Everyone except Mon-El needs to be examined. It sounds like things were pretty hairy for a bit, and I, for one, would like to make sure that you’re all okay. Once I’m finished with Winn, I’ll come get you one at a time to perform your exam.”

Winn was out of earshot before he could hear what happened next, but he thought he could guess from the expressions on James’ and his mother’s faces alone - they both wanted to go with him, to be present while Alex checked him over. When only Alex followed behind him, he sighed, grateful that he would have a bit of privacy.

He turned to look over his shoulder when he heard someone call Alex’s name, holding her back as they discussed something with her. Since he wasn’t needed for that conversation, Winn kept heading for the med lab, sighing once he entered it and the quiet within wrapped around him. He paused just inside the door, trying to decide what to do until Alex joined him.

Exhaustion washed over him with a wave so strong that he almost fell over from it. Winn swayed, his balance faltering when pain shot through his leg as his knee buckled. Figuring it was best to sit down while it was still a choice, he headed for the exam bed closest to the door, limp-hopping to it in order to avoid putting too much weight on his injured leg. Once there, Winn closed his eyes, leaning into the not-so-soft cushion and utterly flat pillow. He was unconscious before he could even summon the energy to reopen his eyes.

**TBC**


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, as this chapter is an entirely new scene, there shouldn't be any dialogue from the show in it. If there is, as usual, all credit goes to the writers. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Alex froze when she walked into the med lab and found Winn asleep on the exam bed. Given how she’d damn-near had to threaten him to get him in here, she hadn’t expected him to be relaxed enough to fall asleep while he waited for her. _Then again,_ she thought as she studied him, noticing the darkness under his eyes and the crinkle of pain in his brows, _maybe being relaxed had noting to do with it._

Loathe as she was to do it, she had to wake him so she could examine him. Did that have to happen right this second? No, but it would be best if it did. She’d barely managed to keep Mary from joining them, having to resort to making up a protocol about only allowing a certain number of people in the med lab at a time during an exam in order to make it happen. Given how Winn had been acting towards his mother since she’d arrived, Alex had assumed he wouldn’t want her with him during the exam. Whether or not she was right, she didn’t know for sure, but she was fairly certain she’d made the right call.

A soft snore from the man on the bed had Alex chuckling fondly before she approached him. “Alright Sleeping Beauty, time to wake up.” Winn stirred, his brows furrowing further, his expression saying he didn’t want to. Alex rolled her eyes and gently shook his shoulder. “Come on, Winn,” she coaxed. “The sooner I finish your exam, the sooner you can go to sleep in your own bed.”

Winn scoffed, confirming her suspicions on how well he’d been sleeping lately, but opened his eyes, narrowing them to slits when the light became too bright. He looked around, no doubt checking to see if anyone else was in the room with them, then focused on her. “I’m surprised you got my mom to wait outside,” he said as he used his left hand to push himself up straighter. “Not including when she’s running off to confront a psychopath, she hasn’t really left me alone since she came back.”

“I’m not sure I can blame her for that,” Alex answered, fully able to see things from a mother’s point of view. Not that she would have _ever_ walked away from her child the way Mary had done, but if there had been another reason she’d been kept from them for two decades, she wouldn’t want to leave their side either.

While Winn got re-situated, she went to one of the tables and grabbed some pillows and a couple of ice packs; she wanted to get the swelling in his knee down before she examined it. He hissed in pain as she slid the pillows under his leg, his mouth frozen in a silent cry of pain until the ice packs started to take effect.Once that was done, she then went back for the supplies to clean and bandage his hand. “She must have missed you while she was gone.”

“Yeah, well, maybe she shouldn’t have left in the first place,” was his reply and Alex winced at how bitter, and angry, he sounded.

At first, Alex didn’t know what to say to that because she knew he had a point. But even so, she couldn’t help but think there was more to it than that. “Did she ever say _why_ she left?” she asked, sitting down on a stool to his right. She placed what she’d gathered onto a low table to her right, then gently grabbed his arm. “I find it hard to believe she wouldn’t have left you without a good reason.”

“Oh, you know her that well, do you?” he retorted drily.

He kept the tension she heard in his voice out of his muscles, allowing her to manipulate his arm in any way she needed. Alex moved one of the pillows to his side so she could have better access to his hand while not annoying the stitches in his forearm.

When she didn’t immediately reply, Winn sighed. “She said that my dad threatened to kill me if she came near me.”

Alex briefly froze, her left hand holding on to his right wrist. She hadn’t known what to expect, as far as reasons went, but she hadn’t ever believed the Toyman would, or could, kill his only son.

Ever since she’d found out who Winn’s father was, she had delved into everything the DEO (and the NCPD) had on Winslow Schott Sr., including the reports from when he had escaped prison two years ago. Since it didn’t fall under the DEO’s purview, she couldn’t get a look at the FBI’s records of all that had gone down, but thankfully the media hadn’t held back. From all she’d been able to read, there hadn’t been anything to indicate that Senior was capable of hurting his son. On the contrary, everything pointed to him loving Winn to the point of him breaking out of prison for Winn.

Doing her best to keep her tone neutral and her eyes on her task, Alex asked, “Do you believe her?” Because, no matter what she, or anyone else, thought, it mattered more if _Winn_ thought it were possible.

He didn’t answer her right away. Alex cleaned the dried blood off of his hand and then carefully spread his fingers out so she could get a better look at the cuts while she waited, doing her best to be patient. She winced when she saw them, her expression echoing his hiss of pain. “You’re lucky these aren’t deeper,” she said, gently probing the torn skin, making him hiss again. “A little bit more, and I’d be able to see bone.”

“My father always did like to make sure he did the maximum amount of damage with his ‘toys’.”

“One of his toys did this?” she asked with surprise, ignoring his derision.

She looked up in time to see Winn nod. “His yo-yo. He, uh, he modified it so that blades could pop out of it.” He tensed as she cleaned the cuts, a muscle in his arm jumping as it jerked. “Although, as it turns out, it was a good thing since it stopped the crazy lady from choking me to death.”

“Yeah, I’m going to check on your throat when I’m done with your arm, by the way,” Alex said, hoping she hid how pissed she was that someone had tried to strangle him. The lady was lucky she was being taken to the NCPD and not being brought back to the DEO, that was for sure - _no one_ hurt her family like that and got away without bruises.

“It’s fine, Alex,” he said dismissively. “It wasn’t long enough to do much damage.”

“Yeah, well, since _I’m_ the one with the actual medical degree, I’m going to wait until _I_ say that before I believe it.” He quietly chuckled, then groaned. The string may not have done “much damage”, but his throat was obviously sore. “You’re going to have to be mindful of your hand until those cuts heal,” she said, bending his arm so that she could take a look at the stitches Amanda had given him. “You could try doing band-aids, but the wounds are in such an awkward place that I wouldn’t count on them staying secure.”

“Man, I can’t believe she wrecked one of my money-makers,” Winn whined, twisting his hand around to get a better look at it.

Alex smiled. She easily remembered one of their first conversations when he’d started working at the DEO; it was one of the things that reminded her to be gentler when it came to handing him things, actually. She would never have called him a pretty face (not that he wasn’t, he simply wasn’t her type), but he had been absolutely correct about the importance of his hands.

“I wouldn’t call that ‘wrecked’,” she said as she unwrapped the bandage Amanda had applied. “And since you’re probably not going to be allowed back at work for a week, I wouldn’t worry too much about it anyways.”

“Hold up. Wait, why can’t I be at work?” he asked, his tone alarmed yet curious.

“Because you are injured, and you have yet to take any bereavement leave, which is standard protocol when a member of your family dies,” J’onn’s voice answered, making both Alex and Winn jump.

“Geez!” Winn griped. “Could you not sneak up on me like that? You’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days.”

Alex wasn’t inclined to be quite so dramatic, but she did glare at J’onn. “You’re lucky I didn’t have scissors or a scalpel in my hand.”

“ _He’s_ lucky?” Winn objected. “Pff, _I’m_ lucky you didn’t have scissors or a scalpel in your hand.”

J’onn ignored them both, his attention back on Winn, his arms crossed over his chest in his usual stance. “I understand that you didn’t consider your father a part of your family, Winn, but you still need to take time to process his death.”

“Do you think I haven’t been doing that since I first saw the news report?” Winn practically growled, making Alex look at him in surprise.

Of all those that worked at the DEO, J’onn J’onzz was the one man that Winn was most respectful with. Sure, his humor would choose to come out in the most awkward ways a lot of the time, and Winn was one of the few who would dare invade J’onn’s personal space with hugs, but he had _never_ been snappy, let alone angry, with the martian that she knew of.

For his part, J’onn didn’t react to Winn’s tone. He raised his head ever so slightly, seemingly looking down on the man in the bed, but Alex recognized it for what it was - Winn had proven J’onn’s point for him with that comment alone.

“I don’t think that bouncing between obsessing over his death, and what it means to, and for, you, and completely avoiding it counts as processing it, no,” J’onn answered, his words firm, but his voice gentle.

Winn ducked his head, backing down in the face of J’onn’s fatherly understanding. Through her grip on his arm, Alex felt fine tremors run through him. Whether they were out of anger, pain, fear, stress, or all of the above, she had no way of guessing, but either way it didn’t matter. While she appreciated J’onn backing her call to bench Winn for the time being, his continued conversation as to why wasn’t helping things.

“I need to redo a couple of stitches,” she said into the silence that had descended, grabbing both of their attention. “J’onn, would you mind grabbing a kit from the cabinet for me?” J’onn’s expression showed that he knew what she was doing, but he didn’t argue. He merely nodded and did as she asked. While he did that, she looked up at Winn. “Did this happen while you were at the factory?”

“Maybe?” he answered with a wince on his face.

“You don’t sound too sure,” J’onn observed as he handed the kit to Alex.

“It’s been a busy day,” Winn defended.

“Let me guess,” Alex said, her annoyance growing with him as she spoke, “you didn’t take it easy on the arm as Amanda instructed after you left her.”

“No?” Winn answered. “What?” he said when both J’onn and Alex sighed. “It’s not like I’m down there trying to bench press the building.”

“No, but those mechanical monkeys weren’t light, either,” J’onn pointed out.

“Okay, fair point, but I didn’t notice anything when I was working with them.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Alex said. Winn winced when she inserted the needle for the local anesthetic. She waited for that to take effect before she started fixing the stitches. “Your arm had been bound with so much gauze, you wouldn’t have noticed if all of the stitches had popped and the cut had started bleeding again until you’d gotten light-headed from blood loss.” Both J’onn and Winn raised their eyebrows at her and Alex shrugged. “What? I’m just saying.”

“At any rate,” J’onn said, his tone changing the subject. “Once Alex is finished with your exam, you are to go home. You will be allowed to return to work in seven days, but that is only _if_ you don’t try to sneak in before then. For every time you’re caught on the premises in that time frame, I will add another day to your leave. Do I make myself clear?”

Wow, J’onn wasn’t fooling around this time. Alex hadn’t heard him be that strict about paid leave since Demos had gotten caught in an explosion then tried to check himself AMA to come back to work. Clearly J’onn knew something more about what was going on with Winn than she did, because _she_ didn’t think all that time off was necessary.

Winn’s brows shot to his hairline, his expression saying he thought the order was a bit much. He looked over at Alex with a question akin to that of ‘is he serious?’ on his face, then looked back at their boss. “Sir, yes sir,” he acknowledged, his tone almost sarcastic. His brows furrowed. “Is everything okay, Papa Bear? You seem grumpier than normal.”

“I’m fine,” J’onn assured, softening his tone ever so slightly. His gaze briefly flicked over to Alex, his worry evident in his eyes, then he refocused on Winn. “It’s you that I’m concerned about.”

“Me?” Winn asked, sounding genuinely confused. He looked at Alex as though for clarification, but when she shrugged, he looked back at J’onn. “I’m fine.”

Alex ducked her head to hide her disbelieving expression. She may not have been around the past several hours, but even she could tell that he wasn’t fine. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, his father’s death was affecting him, and not just by making him angry. On some level, it was hurting him. That alone would have made her think he wasn’t fine, but then his estranged mother showed up and she knew that whatever he had been going through before that had been doubled.

Finished with bandaging Winn’s arm, Alex let it rest on his stomach, briefly distracting him with the action. “I’m going to check your neck now,” she informed, standing up and pivoting so it would be easier to do it. He opened his mouth, no doubt to insist that he was fine, but Alex didn’t give him the chance to speak, forcing his jaw shut as she tipped his head up so she could see better.

The line around his neck was thin, but the bruise that had already started forming looked angry. Winn winced when she touched it, the expression remaining when she rotated his head to test for damage done to his neck. It was obvious he was sore, but beyond that, nothing seemed wrong, so she backed off and prepared to check on his knee.

J’onn was silent while Alex performed her exam, but once she stepped away, he said, “When I came back to the DEO tonight, something felt wrong. At first, I had thought it was another matter,” his gaze flicked over to Alex and she ducked her head, knowing what he was talking about. But, she refused to divulge his father’s health problems to him; it wasn’t right. “The feeling went away, but then it came back, and do you know what it coincided with?”

Winn diverted his gaze, no doubt fully able to guess what it was and not wanting to say it. So, Alex did it for him. “Let me guess,” she said, grabbing the non-invasive scanner they’d gotten from the Kalrichussians. She should also physically exam his injury, but she didn’t think that was necessary. The very heavy limp he’d had when making his way up here told her all she really needed to know when it came to how much he was hurting. “It went away when Winn went to the factory and came back when he returned.”

“Your psyche has been crying out in pain so loudly that it’s hard to hear anything else.” J’onn said, ignoring Alex’s comment and keeping his attention on the man in the bed. With his eyes fully focused on his lap, Winn visibly swallowed but said nothing. J’onn stepped forward and put a hand on Winn’s shoulder, drawing the genius’ attention back to him. “Your friends are concerned about you, Winn,” he said, his voice gentle. “Let us be here for you.”

Winn ducked his head again, and this time Alex saw the hint of tears in his eyes as he did so. He took a shuddering breath, then said, “Thanks Papa Bear.” Looking back up, he offered a weak smile, the kind that moved his mouth only, but said nothing more, which didn’t surprise Alex. It was always hard to get Winn to accept help when the matter was personal.

Taking that as her cue, Alex, who had scanned Winn’s knee while J’onn had been talking, decided inject herself back into the conversation. “Did you hurt your knee again while you were at the warehouse?” she asked, though the images from the scan already told her he had.

“Maybe?” he said, his brows furrowing like he was trying to remember the answer. At Alex’s raised eyebrows he added, “What? There was a lot going on, alright? I didn’t exactly have time to stop and pay attention to things like that when we had airplane bombs and motorized little Hummers with flame throwers and laser shooters coming after us.”

“Right, well, according to the scans, you managed to take your injury from something very mild to something potentially more serious,” Alex said, glad she hadn’t known of the danger her friends had been in until _after_ they’d survived it.

“Potentially?” J’onn asked, his brows furrowed in confusion.

“The Kalrichussian tech isn’t familiar with human physiology,” Winn answered, pointing at the device in Alex’s hands. “So, while it’s superior to ours in regards to seeing any damage done to muscles, ligaments, bones, and what-have-you without the need for a ginormous machine, it isn’t capable of diagnosing what any of it means.” He looked at Alex. “I really should fix that.”

“In the meantime, I would like to get you under the MRI,” Alex said, refusing to allow him to get distracted by her main point. “The images the Kalrichussian scanner gave me are good,” she looked down at them, “better than good, actually, but I’d like to make sure I know what I’m looking at. Just to be on the safe side.”

“So, you’re basically getting a second opinion to your own?” Winn asked.

“Yep.”

Winn sighed. “Look, I trust your judgment, Alex. You’ve had more than enough practice patching us all up; you don’t need another machine to tell you what, I’m fairly certain, you already know.”

Warmed by his faith in her, Alex didn’t know what to say to that. She still wanted to know what the MRI would tell her, but she also knew he was right; she didn’t _technically_ need the machine to tell her what was wrong with him, she was merely being cautious. If she was being honest with herself, her caution wasn’t necessary - knee injuries weren’t life threatening by any means whatsoever - but she also knew that, if not treated right the first time, it could possibly lead to problems for him further on down the road, which she didn’t want.

“Hey,” Kara greeted, entering the med lab looking beautiful as ever. “Jacqueline is officially in police custody and is being charged with kidnapping and assault.” She stopped beside J’onn, briefly looking at all of them before focusing on Alex. “How’s Winn?”

“Seriously?” Winn griped. “I’m right here. You could just ask me.”

“Not if I wanted the truth, I couldn’t,” Kara answered, knowing her friend too well.

Alex smiled, stifling a laugh. “He’ll be fine after a lot of rest and time.”

Kara’s brows furrowed, a mixture of concern and confusion on her face.

“Since he went to the factory without medical clearance,” Alex threw Winn a glare and he rolled his eyes at her, “he made his knee injury worse.”

“How much worse?” Kara asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

Alex looked back down at the images on the scanner. “From what I can tell, he won’t need surgery, but,” she now looked down at Winn, “you will have to stay off the leg for a few weeks.”

“Oh come on,” Winn argued, like Alex had thought he would. “Three weeks? That’s a bit much, don’t you think?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Alex said, not wanting to commit one way or the other. “It depends on how well you take care of it and on your body’s ability to heal. Three weeks is a safe estimate. It could be more, but it could also be less. For now, though, this is what I’m going with.” She set the scanner down, then continued her explanation. “I’ll be applying a brace to help support and protect the joint, and you’ll be using crutches until I say you can stop. Got it?”

Winn faced off with her for a minute, his expression that of an unhappy child. “Whatever you say Doctor Danvers,” he said with a hint of an indulgent smile, rolling his eyes to show her what he thought of it all.

“We’ll leave you to get Winn set up,” J’onn said, looking over at Kara. He looked down at the man in question. “Get some rest, and let us know if you need anything.”

Kara, who hadn’t been around for the earlier conversation, looked confused at that, but she smiled at Winn, resting her left hand on his shin. “James said he’d take you home. I’ll meet you guys there when I’m done.”

“James still needs an exam, too,” Alex argued, not liking the idea of Winn being here longer than he needed to be.

“While you were up here, Amanda and Felix conducted Mary’s and James’ exams,” Kara filled in. Since both medics were more than qualified for that duty, Alex let it go. She would have preferred to be consulted before it had happened, but she trusted her staff enough to know that wasn’t a necessary step.

“Is my mom still here?” Winn asked, his voice quiet, like he was afraid to hear the answer.

When Kara looked at Alex with hesitation, Alex felt her stomach drop. Please don’t say his mother had just up and left him again.

“She was,” Kara answered, “but when we made it clear that you would be here for a while, we managed to talk her into going back to her hotel for the night.”

Winn snorted. “Ten bucks says she won’t be there in the morning.”

Alex felt several urges at once. She wanted to slap him upside the head for doubting his mom would stick around, for not giving her a chance to prove that she would remain in his life this time. But, she also wanted to hug him, to help soothe the pain she could hear behind his words; she wanted to let him know that, no matter what his mother did, neither she, nor any of them at the DEO would abandon him.

Judging by the crinkle in the middle of Kara’s brows, her sister had the same desires. Like Alex, she didn’t act on them, instead pulling a piece of paper out of her suit and holding it out for Winn to grab. “She said for you to call her when you’re ready to talk.” She waited for him to take it from her, shock making his movements slow, then she re-folded her arms over her chest. “She isn’t going to leave you again, Winn. I truly believe that.”

Winn said nothing, staring at the paper in his hand with a blank expression which showed he didn’t know what to say or think.

Seeing that nothing more needed to be said, J’onn and Kara left to debrief about the day’s events. Choosing that moment to grab the knee brace and crutches, Alex turned her back on Winn, giving him as much privacy as she could in the small space. When she turned back around, the piece of paper with Mary’s phone number on it was gone, but Winn still had the stunned expression on his face.

“You going to call her?” Alex asked, applying the brace as gently as she could.

Winn’s breath hitched. “I…” he said, trailing off, clearly unsure how to finish his answer. He paused, then asked, “What would you do?”

“I can’t answer that for you,” Alex said, sitting back down on the stool. They were officially done with his exam, but she wasn’t about to discourage him from talking or asking for advice. Trouble was, she didn’t have any good advice to give him. “When we were told that my father had died, our hearts broke and my world, sort of, shattered.” She let out a shuddering breath, refusing to let the memories of that time overwhelm her. “So when we found him, it was never a question for me of whether or not I wanted him in my life. It was all I’ve ever wanted since the moment he’d left for his last assignment.”

She reached out to grab his hand, to comfort him, but then she remembered that it was injured and she switched to putting her hand on his lower shin, giving it a squeeze. “I can’t answer your question, Winn, because our situations are very different.” She waited to see if he’d reply, but when he remained silent, eyes staring intently at his lap, she asked, “Do you want her to stay?”

Winn made a sound that was halfway between a scoff and exasperation. “I don’t know,” he said, sounding so lost and scared and hurt that Alex gave up fighting her sisterly instincts and stood up and hugged him. He froze for a minute, then he relaxed, letting his head fall onto her chest. Alex carded her hand through his hair, an action she’d performed so many times over the years when Kara had come home upset. “I don’t know what to do.”

Though it was muffled by her shirt, Alex could hear tears in his voice and she hated it. She held on to him tighter, glad he couldn’t see the tears that were beginning to gather in her eyes. His suffering hurt her. A part of her wished that Mary had never come back into his life, while the other part hoped they would be able to patch things between them, to help Winn feel more able to put all that his father had done to him behind him.

She hugged him for a little while longer, giving J’onn a nod of reassurance when he showed up with concern on his face. Apparently, Winn’s psyche was still crying out to him, and being the Papa Bear that Winn often referred to him as, he couldn’t help but come and make sure his friend was okay. When Winn slowly started to pull away, she let him go, stepping back to give him space.

“At any rate,” she said, turning around to grab the crutches for him. She fixed them to his height, then stood off to the side and waited as he stiffly pivoted so he was sitting on the side of the bed. “You don’t have to decide everything tonight.” Once he had eased off the bed and into a semi-stable standing position, she handed the crutches over to him. “In fact,” she said as he took them from her and adjusted to them, “you shouldn’t even try to think of it tonight. It’s been a long week and a hard day - you need rest.”

Winn chuckled, the smile half on his face. “Yeah,” he said, sounding doubtful. He smiled again, obviously making an effort to make it more genuine. “Goodnight, Alex.”

Her smile was just as forced as his, but she hoped it looked sincere. Since she didn’t want to knock him off balance, she refrained from pulling him into another hug. “Let me know if you need anything?”

He nodded, but said nothing before crutching out of the lab. Alex sighed after he left. Pulling out her phone, she sent a text to the next person in line to try.

**Tag, you’re it.**

**TBC**


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have FINALLY finished this chapter. I know I promised it would only be 4 chapters long, but unfortunately, it had other ideas and it will now be five. Fingers crossed it doesn't extend any further, lol. 
> 
> I apologize for any and all mistakes. I've edited this thing so much by this point that I'm fairly certain I wouldn't recognize an error for what it was, so I'm just posting it.

**Tag, you’re it.** ****

James was already on his way upstairs when he received the text from Alex. He stopped halfway up the staircase to read it, quietly chuckling before putting his phone back into his pocket and continuing on his way. Once on flat ground, he pulled his phone back out and sent a reply.

_Went that well, huh?_

Knowing that he wouldn’t find Winn in the med lab, James didn’t even bother heading for it. Instead, he went in the direction of his friend’s lab.

 **He’s hurting,** Alex sent back. It wasn't unexpected, but it was still hard for James to read. None of them liked what their friend was going through. They had all tried to be there for him during the past week, but there was only so much Winn would let them do, leaving them to watch from the sidelines as he suffered in silence. **J’onn is forcing Winn to take a week off.** ****

James frowned, typing, _Are Winn’s injuries that serious?_

He hadn’t thought they were, but he also wasn’t a doctor, so he could be wrong. Three dots appeared, showing that Alex was typing, so James stepped into a side corridor until she finished. When he next saw Winn, he wanted to have all the facts at his disposal, and since Winn wouldn’t give them to him, James was forced to wait for Alex to do it.

 **Physically, no. He’ll be on crutches for a few weeks until his knee heals, but otherwise, he’ll be fine within the week.** There was a pause, the three dots appearing again, then a second text came in. **Emotionally, I’m not sure if a week is long enough or too long. J’onn said he could psychically hear how much pain Winn was in. He gave Winn the time off to work on healing that.** ****

James’ first thought was doubt about whether Winn should be using crutches with his injured hand and arm, but it was quickly followed with whether a week would be too long; Winn would go crazy being home that long with nothing but his thoughts for company. Then it occurred to him that Winn didn’t have to be home alone.

_Hey, what are you and Kara doing tonight?_

**Meeting you at Winn’s. Kara’s bringing the food, I’m bringing the booze.** ****

James smiled; he should have guessed the sisters’ plans. Though he didn’t know Alex nearly half as well as he did Kara, he knew they both had big hearts. There was only so long they would willingly sit idly by while a friend was hurting. Apparently, like James, they had reached their limit.

_Pizza and Pot Stickers?_

**The best comfort food around. We’ll see you in thirty.** ****

James chuckled. He honestly wasn’t sure if Winn also found pizza and pot stickers comforting, or if he ate it because it was Kara’s favorite. In the end, James supposed it didn’t matter. It was a ritual they had developed long ago and weren’t likely to change it any time soon.

Putting his phone back into his pocket, James started to head for Winn’s lab, only to stop dead when he saw Winn standing not three feet away, staring at him with a curious little smile on his face.

“Who were you talking to?” Winn asked, his tone indicating he thought it was a love interest.

“It’s not what you think,” James said, wanting to nip any idea of him in a romantic relationship in the bud. “You ready?”

“Are you?” Winn’s smirk made James roll his eyes.

“Dude, it’s not what you think,” he assured, stepping away from the wall and joining his friend at the hallway’s entry-point. “Alex and Kara are meeting us at your place. We were just coordinating.”

Winn sighed. “You guys don’t have to do that,” he said, his tone that of someone humoring his overprotective friends. “I’m okay. Really.”

“And, I would believe you, if I hadn’t already talked to Alex.” James smiled when Winn scoffed, obviously already working on an argument, but James didn’t give him a chance to come up with one. “Look, if my estranged father died, which I discovered via the news, and then my even more estranged mother showed up at his funeral, wanting to be in my life again, I definitely wouldn’t be okay. I’d be confused. I’d be hurt…I’d be, I’d be _pissed,_ man.”

The more James talked, the angrier he got, enough so that by the time he was finished speaking, he _was_ pissed. He’d started out frustrated by all Winn was going through, but now he was mad. For the entire evening, he had encouraged Winn to forgive his mom, but after minutely placing himself in Winn’s shoes, he realized how inept that advice had been.

Putting those feelings aside for the moment, James frowned when he saw a wince appear on Winn's face. "You sure you should be using crutches, man?" he asked, his gaze briefly going to his friend's bandaged arm before returning to his face. "That can't be good for your arm."

"Well I wasn't about to let Alex put me in a wheelchair..."

"Something which I'm sure Alex already knew," James answered, talking more to himself than to Winn. As they approached the stairs, James put a hand on Winn’s shoulder. “Why don’t you let me carry your bag?”

Winn’s eyebrows rose, the expression on his face saying, ‘Are you kidding me with this?’, to which James tightened his grip, curling his fingers around the strap to Winn’s work messenger bag. Winn rolled his eyes, allowing a scoff of what James assumed was exasperation to escape as he shifted his stance, and the crutches, to do as James asked. “Happy now?”

“Yes,” James answered, genuinely happy to know that Winn wouldn’t be going down the stairs with anything potentially impeding his balance. Even so, he kept a close watch on his friend, making sure to remain nearby in case he needed help. It didn’t take long for James to figure out his help wouldn’t be needed. “You’re a natural with those things.”

“Yeah, well, I should be, I had to use them often enough growing up.”

James frowned, confused. He couldn’t remember Winn ever having mentioned any accidents while he was a kid. In fact, now that he thought about it, he realized how little Winn spoke about his childhood. A part of him could understand why - if his father had been a notorious murder, James wouldn’t have said much about when he was young either - but he would have thought that, once that crazy cat was out of the bag, that would have changed. Yet, in the two years since they had all figured out who Winn’s father was, James could only recall a handful of times when Winn had ever alluded to his past.

“Why?” he asked, curious.

Winn’s expression became shifty, almost nervous, and James felt his heart sink. He’d seen that look many times since his youth. It was the look domestic abuse victims always got when you asked how they had been hurt. Nine times out of ten, they were vague, or they outright lied. The expression didn’t last long on Winn, it was there and gone so fast that James could believe he’d imagined it, but Winn’s answer was enough to convince him his suspicions were correct.

“Oh, you know,” Winn shrugged, not an easy thing to do when using crutches, “accidents happen.”

“Yeah, they do,” James played along, making a mental note to look into Winn’s time in the foster care system. He couldn’t do anything about what had happened to his friend, but being better informed was never a bad thing…and if he managed to bring up charges against one of the people, so much the better. “We better hurry if we want any chance of getting any food. Kara’s bringing pizza and pot stickers, and you know how much she can eat.”

“Oh man,” Winn said, his usual demeanor returning. Since they were already moving at a brisk pace, there wasn’t really a need for them to go faster; it was simply a way to change the subject. “It makes me glad that Barry doesn’t often come to this universe. National City wouldn’t be able to keep up!”

**oOo**

After making sure she wouldn’t be seen, Kara landed on Winn’s balcony, swiftly changing into her normal clothes the minute she did so. When she’d first become Supergirl, it had been hard to get used to switching between her Supergirl costume and her street clothes. It had taken many failed attempts for her to get it right, and even then, there had been many blunders. Thankfully, no one unknown had been around to notice when anything was amiss - she had enough people who knew about her identity - but it could easily have been strangers and she knew it, so now she double checked to be safe.

“You know, when Alex said you were bringing the food, I assumed you’d be actually _arriving with the food_ ,” James said with two boxes of pizza and three orders of pot stickers in his hands as he awkwardly closed Winn’s front door. How he knew she was there, Kara didn’t know; much like Winn, he just seemed to always be aware of her.

“I didn’t want the food to get cold,” she explained, though she would have thought that was obvious.

“Because, heaven forbid, she has to eat cold pot stickers,” Winn joked from her left as he came out of his bedroom.

Kara looked between her friends, happy to see hints of smiles on both their faces. “Cold pot stickers are gross,” she said definitively, quickly adding, “and they don’t reheat well.” Actually, they reheated fine, but they were definitely better fresh.

Both men snorted, no doubt knowing what she did, but choosing not to call her on it. Kara resisted the urge to run for the pot stickers and scarf down the first order on her own, but barely. Though she _was_ starving, the whole point of tonight wasn’t food, it was to be there for Winn.

"Is Alex on her way?" Kara asked, changing the subject as she joined Winn on the sofa.

"Yep," James answered, setting the food onto the island which separated the kitchen from the living room. "She made a quick stop at her place, then she sent a text to let us know she was on her way." James turned his back to them as he opened the pizza boxes, the heavenly smell of grease and cheese wafting over almost enough to make Kara whimper. When he turned back around, he had two plates with a slice of pizza on them. "She also said that we didn't have to wait for her," he said, handing one plate to Kara and the other to Winn.

"Thank god," Kara said, happily accepting her plate. "I'm so hungry, I could eat..."

"Everything," the two men said as one. While James went back to grab himself some food, Winn added, "Yeah, we know."

Kara was about to respond when someone knocked on the door. She felt more than saw Winn tense at the sound, and, unable to stop herself, she reached out and laid her hand on his forearm, careful not to press on the stitches as she did so. Did he really think his mom would come now when she had promised to wait for him to call her? Kara didn’t think it was likely, but then again, she had only known Mary for less than a day, so how certain could she be?

Figuring it couldn’t hurt to be sure, Kara scanned through the door. Giving Winn’s arm a very gentle squeeze, she gave him a smile and assured, “It’s just Alex.”

“Yeah, I know,” he answered, clearly trying to hide his reaction. He gave her a quick smile of thanks, then pulled his arm out of her grasp, shifting his grip on his plate so he could offer the newcomer a wave of welcome.

“Hey guys,” Alex greeted as she walked in, carrying a six-pack of beer. Since Winn had a small, but tasteful collection of harder alcohol, Alex hadn’t needed to bring anything more. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Nonsense, you’re right on time,” Kara answered before her sister could explain further. Something about Alex’s furtive glances towards Winn told her that Mary had shown up somewhere, and she didn’t want Winn thinking about his mother right now. As she spoke, she got up from the over-large sofa, heading straight for more pot stickers. “I’ve only just gotten here myself.”

Alex’s eyebrows shot up, her expression that of disbelief. “And you’re already on your second helping of pot stickers?”

“What?” Kara answered with a shrug. “I was starving and James said that you said it was okay to start without you.”

“I…may have stretched that last part a bit,” James admitted. At Kara’s accusing expression, he held his hands up. “What? I knew you were dying to dig in, and I legitimately didn’t think Alex would mind if we started earlier.”

“It’s fine,” Alex assured, a smile slowly spreading over her face. “I was just yanking your chain.”

“Well, now that you _are_ here,” Kara said after piling pot stickers onto her plate and adding another slice of pizza, “we can truly get this party started.”

James’ browns wrinkled in confusion. “I’m not sure food and beer, while watching some sci-fi tv show counts as a party.”

“Okay, one, Doctor Who isn’t just ‘some sci-fi tv show’,” Winn argued, sounding insulted. “And two, it’s always a party when I’m in attendance.”

Kara shared a look with her sister and James. “And you’re going to do that from your spot on the couch?” she asked him doubtfully.

“Duh,” he answered like it was obvious. He gave a shrug. “Besides, it’s not like I have to _stay_ on the couch. I can get up.”

“You think so?” Alex challenged, crossing her arms over her chest and staring him down.

“I _did_ ,” he said, sounding hesitant, “until you started looking at me like that.”

“Yeah, you aren’t moving from that spot for the rest of the night,” Kara added, settling in next to him. She loved that his couch was big enough for all of them to sit on. They certainly couldn’t do that on hers.

Satisfied that Winn would behave, Alex grabbed her own plate of food then sat down next to Kara, leaving the spot on Winn’s left open for James to sit in.

Happy to have her friends all around her, Kara got comfy and laid her plate on her lap. “So…what are we watching again?”

**oOo**

Three hours later and Kara still didn’t understand what it was she was watching. Winn had refused to explain the show, choosing instead to tell them to just shut up and watch it. She had to admit that, though she didn’t get it, it was pretty entertaining. She wasn’t entirely sure how a horse from Revolutionary France got onto a spaceship, but she wasn’t hating it.

Sometime during one of her trips for more food, Alex had taken her place, snuggling into Winn and promptly falling asleep. For his part, Winn simply wrapped his arm around her, pulling her into his so she could lay her head on his chest, and kept watching the show. Now both Alex _and_ Winn were asleep, with Winn leaning against James, whose thumbs were flying over his phone.

“You have been on that thing half the night,” she said, sitting down in Alex’s vacated spot. “What, do you have a girlfriend you didn’t tell us about?”

“Why does everyone think I have a girlfriend?” James asked with frustrated annoyance in his voice. “Can’t a guy be single without his friends making up imaginary girlfriends?”

“Well, first of all, I’m not convinced that she _is_ imaginary, and second, methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

“The lady protesteth the perfect amount,” James argued back. “It’s her nosy friends that are the problem.”

“Like you’re one to talk, dude,” Winn mumbled sleepily. “You’ve just spent the night looking into my medical history.”

“You what?” Kara asked, surprised.

James ignored her, looking down at his friend. “How’d you know that?”

“Seriously?” Winn asked, giving him a look, plainly calling James an idiot for asking. “How do you think you got access to all of them?”

“You let me surreptitiously dig into your records?” James asked doubtfully.

“I took down all the firewalls and disabled the viruses so you could do it without killing your phone. Now hush, we’re trying to sleep over here.”

“Not anymore we’re not,” Alex groused, disentangling herself from Winn to sit up. “No one could sleep with you three yammering.”

“Hey! We don’t yammer,” Winn objected, sitting up straighter as well. He winced when he used his right arm, immediately shifting to favor it, leaning more to his left as he moved.

“With these two involved, it’s really more like chittering,” James added.

“Hey, you chitter just as much as we do,” Kara pointed out.

“What Kara means to say is that we don’t chitter,” Winn interjected.

Kara looked at him around her sister, “We kind of do chitter…a little.”

Winn minutely shrugged, silently conceding the point, but said nothing.

“So…why were you looking into Winn’s medical history?” Alex asked into the silence.

“He thinks something sinister happened while I was in foster care,” Winn answered for his friend, sounding like he thought the idea was ridiculous.

“Am I wrong?” James challenged.

Kara expected Winn to immediately say yes, but when he remained silent, she felt her heart sink into her stomach at the implications of his non-answer.

After far too long, Winn sighed, his focus fixed by the blue police box on the tv. "When it first starts, you know it's wrong," he said so quietly that even kara had trouble hearing him. "There's this little voice inside your head, you know, telling you th-that you don't deserve what's happening to you, but at that age, you can't fight back. Not really. And the doctors and nurses, you can tell they suspect something, but back then, things like abuse were very much look the other way, so they don't say anything. They look at you with pitying expressions, but they just patch you up and send you back for more."

Through the tv light, Kara saw a tear streak down Winn's cheek, and it took everything she had to remain still and listen. She wanted nothing more than to curl around her friend, to protect him from the memories that were battering against his carefully constructed shields, but she knew she couldn't do that. Though it was hard, it was better for him not to burry this stuff.

"For the longest time, I held out hope that my mom would come and get me. That she'd, that she'd be there one day after school, you know? She'd be waiting for me, my stuff in her hands, and we'd drive off into the sunset or something ridiculous like that."

Winn ducked his head, now focusing on his lap rather than the screen. He took a quiet, shuddering, breath, and that was all it took for her resolve to melt. She couldn't sit by anymore while her friend suffered. In one swift movement, she was cuddling against him, careful not to hurt him as she did so. She frowned when she felt him shaking and pulled him as close to her as he could get without even thinking about it.

She may as well have not even moved for all the reaction Winn gave. He didn't fight her as she practically wrapped herself around him. If it hadn't been for the fact that she knew she was alive, Kara would have thought she was a ghost that he couldn't see or feel.

"After the third visit, I stopped hoping for a rescuer," he continued with resignation in his voice. "After the seventh, I quit looking for help. By the tenth, I began to believe that maybe I deserved what was happening. That I was somehow atoning for my father's sins, that all the bad that was happening to me was making up for the evil he had done." He swallowed hard, and Kara felt tears land on the sleeve of her shirt. She carefully pulled away from him, so she could focus on him better. "It wasn't until high school, when I got placed with a new, kinder, family, that I was reminded how wrong it all was. But the damage was done, you know, and no matter how much I tried, I could still hear their voices in my head, telling me how worthless I am, and how it's no wonder my mother didn't come for me when I would no doubt turn out just like my dad."

Winn chewed on his lower lip, the action pulling his face into a tear-filled snarl.

"She said that he threatened to kill me if she came back for me," he continued, the change of topic so swift that it took Kara a minute to figure out he was referring to his mother and his father. "But leaving me, like she did, in that _place_ was so much worse than any death could have been. And she wants me to what? Forgive her? Understand where she's coming from?" He scoffed, anger briefly making his expression frosty before melting into defeat. He sighed. "I just...I don't know if I can."

“You don’t have to,” Alex firmly assured, beating Kara to it by a millisecond. All while Winn talked, Alex had stayed curled up against the arm of the sofa. Having expected her sister to comfort their friend not long after he’d begun talking, Kara had been surprised by her remaining still. Now, however, she unfolded and got onto the floor, kneeling in front of Winn, who looked apprehensive about what she was doing. Placing her hands on his thighs, she added, “If you don’t want to forgive your mom, you don’t have to. If you would rather tell her to leave and not come back, you can. We will support you no matter what you decide.”

“But?” he asked, his tone cautious.

“No ‘but’,” Alex answered. “I know it wasn’t easy telling us all that, but I’m glad you did.” Winn scoffed, now making sure to look anywhere but at them. His gaze was briefly caught by the blue police box on the tv, before, unable to resist, he focused back on Alex. “I’m glad you told us,” she reassured. “I’m glad you trusted us enough with this part of yourself that you’ve kept hidden for so long.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t ask sooner,” Kara interjected, feeling the statement so deeply that it hurt. Winn delved into each and every one of their lives, knew their secrets, kept them safe, and yet they hadn’t even bothered to try learning about him. Sure, a part of the could be placed on his desire to keep things private, but had they truly tried, he would have talked to them and she knew it.

“No, that’s, that’s not on you guys,” Winn argued, shaking his head. Although he didn’t move, Kara could see him pulling away from them, distancing himself from them as he had before.

“Yes it is,” Kara returned, refusing to allow him to put the walls back up.

“I’m so sorry, man,” James said, speaking up for the first time since Winn had started talking. The amount of grief she heard in her friend’s voice drew Kara’s attention to him, where she was shocked to see a curious mixture of pain and disgust on his face.

Although Kara didn’t understand the emotions, Winn evidently did, because when he looked to his left and saw James, he didn’t tense like she would have expected. Instead, he visibly softened, his tone kind as he said, “James.”

“I had no right to give you the advice I did,” James said, apparently refusing to let anything else come out of Winn’s mouth. “Had I known then what I know now, I would have never said anything.” He paused as he shifted so that he could face Winn. “Like Alex said, we’ll support you no matter what you decide to do. No judgment, and no more words of wisdom on my part.”

“Oh, you have wisdom?” Winn joked, a smile quirked at the corner of his mouth.

James chuckled, and just like that, the tension in the room seemed to break, releasing them from its suffocating hold.

They settled back in to finish watching the current episode, which had somehow switched from a girl in a fireplace to robot men walking around an alternate version of London, with no one really moving from their spot. Alex got comfortable on the floor, leaning against the sofa for support while she remained as close to Winn as she could. James pivoted a little, returning back to his previous position so that Winn could fall back asleep against him. Kara went to reheat the food she’d grabbed but hadn’t touched, then settled back in at Winn’s side.

Since the episode was apparently a two-parter, it took way longer than anticipated to finish it. By the time it was done, Alex and James were both asleep. Winn, on the other hand, appeared to be wide awake, though Kara doubted he’d seen any of what had transpired in the show.

“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered, making sure not to wake the others.

Knowing that he was referring to his mother, and not knowing how to help him with that, Kara changed the direction of the conversation. “For now, go get some sleep,” she said, standing up to help him into his bedroom if he needed it. “Tomorrow, you can try to decide everything with a clearer head, but tonight, just sleep.” She looked down at her sleeping family. “I think it’s safe to say we’re camping out here for the night.”

“You guys don’t have to do that,” Winn quietly objected as he took Kara’s offered hand and eased himself off the couch and out of Alex’s way.

“If you think I’m going to let Alex drive home half-asleep, you’re crazy,” Kara argued back, taking his weight with ease as he leaned on her rather than using the crutches. “You’ve seen how she drives normally.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded breathily as they slowly made their way to his bed.

Although they both knew Kara could have carried him like he weighed no more than a baby, Winn seemed to be doing his best not to lean too heavily on her, leaving him to force his injured leg to take too much of his weight instead. Kara felt him tense each time he did it, but she said nothing since they were at his bedside in no time.

“Do you need anything?” she asked as she helped him sit on top of the mattress. Without waiting for an answer, she knelt down and helped him lay his injured leg on the bed, ensuring he didn’t strain it too much by trying to do it on his own. While he got settled, she went and grabbed a spare throw pillow then gently positioned it under his knee.

“Thanks Kara,” he said on a sigh, grabbing her hand and giving it a squeeze.

Knowing that he was thanking her for more than helping him get to bed, Kara smiled and returned his hand squeeze. “You would have done the same for any of us.”

Worn out from the day’s events, Winn was asleep before he could respond. Kara stayed with him long enough to make sure he was sleeping peacefully, then she closed his door all but a crack and proceeded to wait and listen. She couldn’t protect him from the memories that would haunt him tonight, but she could be there for him when they did.

**TBC**


End file.
